Sorry Lou, won't happen again.
You are of course correct about Mr. Toffler's relationship with Newt Gingrich
- "the Grinch who stole everything," and Newt wrote a forward to their book,
"Creating A New Civilization: The politics of the Third Wave." Newt traces
his relationship with the Toffler's back to the 1970s. It is equally true
that the theoretical basis of "War and Anti-War" underlay American military
doctrine.
What the Toffler's have to their "credit" - or rather wealth, is popularizing
the framework of changes in the industrial economy, in a manner in which
people think things out. That the bourgeois intellectual would frame and
create a certain language structure in which class battles are fought out is
nothing new and have given use terms like "race," "Third World,"
Neo-Liberalism," "Globalization," "Information Revolution," and a litany of
non-class concepts of reality. The Toffler's concept of the "prosumer" and
"prosumer theory" - while deeply meditating on the world's poverty-stricken
masses, denies that this 2-3 billion people are for all practical purposes a
communist class. Why is it a perquisite that one must sell their labor power
to eat and be housed, educated and enjoy the accumulated wealth of humanity?
The Toffler's consider themselves some kind of Marxist in their past life,
and did a stint in the auto industry - assembly, during a period of time when
Marxism gained some popularity in the industrial enclaves. The underlying
theoretical grid of Marx and Engels has more than less triumphed -
universally. Everyone with any meaningful things to say about society change
generally accepts the materialist conception - approach, to societal change.
The doctrine and class content of the politics of Marx and Engels is another
matter. I have not in the past and this remains true to this day, subscribe
to the Toffler's politics. The surface similarity is the result of living in
the same society at the same juncture of history and I am aware of the
profound theoretical differences that manifest itself as practical politics.
Their very different general conception of why and how - on what basis, the
technological advance is implemented and their articulation of the law of
value, is not a matter of articulation but the class struggle and property
relations. On the question of the direction of the future distribution of the
social products - outside the framework of buying and selling, very little is
stated.
The property relations underlying socially necessary means of production is
jettisoned in favor of the increasingly abstract nature of organizing and
directing production process and implementing mass bourgeois democracry. The
increasingly ability of machines to replicate human motion - laboring, and
the ability to play back this process in the absence of the worker is
downplayed and what Marx calls the "bourgeoisie as involuntary promoter of
industry" is submerged under the concept of "Indust-reality," whose reality
is buttressed by property relations.
On the extremely touchy matter of class rule as a transitory form of
authority from one distinct mode of production to another even less is
stated. Here the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is being
referenced.
Nevertheless, the Toffler's constructed and impacted the language in which
change is talked about, and framed the mass discussion for the past 30 years.
It was in that light that this somewhat dated interview was forwarded. If
nothing else the Toffler's have successfully commodified and packaged the
knowledge of knowing and the wave of change Marx speaks of as cooperation and
its path altering infrastructure impact and direction. First here and then
there: in one branch of industry to another, through the transportation and
communications sectors, to the movement of money as symbolic equations stored
in machines, and so on.
Who says that repackaging Marx is no longer profitable?
In the future - from now on, I shall take bandwidth more serious, do as you
stated and send the URL. Sorry.
Well, Once again I am over my submitting limit.:)
Melvin P.